Now, organizations in Africa have new tools to help them use Google Maps and Google Earth to bring awareness to causes in a more visually appealing and impactful way.

For instance, if your organization is focused on providing humanitarian support to various regions around the world, with many projects taking place all the time, Google Earth can help you showcase all of these projects in a Google Earth Layer and give users the ability to get more information on the individual projects themselves while keeping a holistic view of all the projects your organization has underway.

The Surui Tribe of the Amazon Rainforest has recently partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute to create a Google Earth tour which flies viewers on a virtual tour through the Gombe Chimpanzee Reserve and the Surui Indigenous territory to show what indigenous people are doing to preserve their rainforest and prepare to enter the global carbon marketplace.

Organizations can use Google Maps and Google Maps API to plot their organizations' unique offerings, programs, impacts, constituencies and news in an easily accessible way and then embed these custom maps within a website. Watch brief video tutorials here.

World Justice Map uses Google Maps to showcase information about global rule-of-law promoters and makes it easy for users to identify organizations by name, status, activities and discipline. United for Africa uses Google Maps to document and track persecution and other assaults throughout South Africa. Users can submit incidents and customize their view with various filters. Many organizations are also using Ushahidi, an open source platform using Google Maps API, to allow anyone to submit information from webforms, emails and texts to a visual map representation.

There are an enormous variety of ways to customize Google Earth & Maps to benefit your organization. Google Earth and Maps are open to organizations in Africa and elsewhere around the world and you're encouraged to apply for a software grant of Google Earth Pro today! Visit the Google Earth Outreach site to find out more.

This month's resource round-up for January includes video performances from last week's Hope for Haiti concert, two new guides to help navigate fundraising and volunteering in the new year and a video from a Google Apps product manager about how to make your organization more efficient with Google Apps.

Hope for Haiti ConcertLast Friday's concert performances to raise money for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti can now be seen on YouTube.

Guide for Working With Technical VolunteersTechSoup has updated their free guide for recruiting and managing technical volunteers at non-profits. Determine your org's technical needs and develop a plan for managing your technical volunteers effectively.

If you come across resources that would be useful to the greater non-profit community, feel free to post it to Non-profit and grantee resources topic in our discussion forum so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, just click here and read through previous months' round-ups or search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.

Lisa, an AdWords specialist and long-time Google Grants volunteer, presented valuable information to our beginner audience, including account navigation tips, basic instructions for creating and editing ads and keywords, and much more. Lisa also discussed some helpful tools and reports to take advantage of in your AdWords account, including the Keyword Tool and the the Keyword Performance Report. Also covered in the session were strategies to evaluate and track performance, including free offerings like Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics that can help you track how users interact with your site after they click on your AdWords ads.

Attendees were encouraged to spend time in their accounts trying out the tools available in the 'Opportunities' tab and running reports to help evaluate the performance of their keywords, ads, campaigns, and more. We recommend that you also spend some time experimenting with the many AdWords tools and reports if you have not already done so.

If you missed the session and are interested in the above topics, you can view the slides here and purchase the audio recording here.

If you attended this webinar and would like to discuss your takeaways with others, please take a moment to share your thoughts in the Google Grants Help Forum "Webinar" category.

If you would like to attend the final session in the Beginners series which will cover optimizing your account for success, you can find information and register here.

For information about our upcoming four-part Advanced webinar series for more savvy grantees, please visit NTEN's site for more details.

Kate Bladow shared some interesting insights in a recent series on Beth's Blog, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media regarding the role of listening in the world of non-profit marketing. According to the non-profits with which Kate spoke, the role of listening in an organization can be the difference between engaging deeply with your constituency to achieve your org's mission and alienating them through spam or other irrelevant touch points.

I'll touch upon some of the highlights of Kate's series and bring to light some of the best practices she gathered from various non-profits, but you can get more detail about the concept of listening literacy from the blog series.

To begin with, Kate defines listening as "knowing what is being said online about your organization, field or issue." Basically, the act of going out into the social web - blogs, social networks, bulletin boards, Twitter, search engines - and picking out conversations relevant to your organization or cause.

The value of this exercise is that you can then use the conversations you encounter to improve your programs (even negative comments are an opportunity to improve) to identify misconceptions about your organization that you can actively work to change as well as finding opportunities to engage with your constituency in a relevant and meaningful way.

Kate Bladow is a Non-Profit Techie that works for Pro Bono Net by day and blogs at Technola by night. Beth Kanter authors Beth's Blog, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, contributes to various books on the subject of technology in the non-profit space and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week's "Voices of Innovation for Social Media."

To help with the search efforts, a team of Googlers worked with the US State Department to create a PeopleFinder gadget that you can embed on your organization's website.

With this gadget, users can submit information about missing persons and also search for people via the database. The gadget is currently available in English, French and Creole and easy instructions for installing the gadget on your org's website are here.

Google Voice is also offering free phone calls to Haiti for the next two weeks for US families with relatives in-country. Those without a Google Voice account can request an invitation here.

If you're a grant recipient providing relief to those affected by the earthquake in Haiti and have questions about managing your AdWords account to scale with traffic increases, please contact our team so we can make sure you reach those in need and those who can help. Be sure to include "Haiti Disaster" in the subject of your request.

This first session of the Beginners series largely focused on identifying goals for your organization's account and how doing this is really key to the success of your Google Grant. Once you have your goals established, it's easy to structure your account, campaigns, and ad groups to reflect these goals and better track how close you are to meeting them. The session slides included an exercise that can be helpful to any grantee, whether new to the program or not.

We recommend taking a few minutes to view the slides and go through the quick exercise to ensure you clearly know your goals and are keeping them top-of-mind when managing your account.

If you attend this webinar and want to discuss your takeaways with others, please share your thoughts in the Google Grants Help Forum "Webinar" category.

If you would like to attend the next sessions in the Beginners series, which focus on tangibly managing your account and optimizing it for success, you can find info and register here. For information about our upcoming four-part Advanced webinar series for more savvy grantees, please visit NTEN's site for more details.

The School of Social Work hosted the event on campus and invited local non-profit organizations who work closely with the U-M SSW Office of Field instruction. The attendees represented a number of Michigan non-profit organizations and focused on a variety of areas including education, the medical field and family services.

The event featured a brief overview of the Google AdWords platform and the Google Grants program specifically, followed by a panel discussion featuring local non-profits who are current Grants advertisers. It was an exciting opportunity for local organizations to share their knowledge about managing non-profits online and using free Google tools to make the most out of limited resources in a tough economy.

All of the panelists offered insight into their own unique experiences with Google Grants and marketing non-profit organizations online. The panelists included Amanda Edmonds, Executive Directorat Growing Hope, Jim Leija, Public Relations Manager at University Musical Society, and Marianne Clauw, Treasurer at CASAof Washtenaw County

Here are a few unique perspectives the panelists shared during the event:

You don’t have to be tech savvy to run a Google Grants account or to use Google products, but you have to be enthusiastic about putting the time in to learn and play with the products.

The online resources for Google tools, both AdWords and otherwise, are plentiful. The online videos for Google AdWords and Google Grants were touted as being especially helpful and easy to use.

Your website is a crucial tool for any organization, especially a non-profit organization that may not have a big marketing budget. Interested parties must be able to find your website online and once they find it, they should be compelled to stay there.

Google Analytics is a must-use tool for understanding who is visiting your site and what they are doing once they get there. Once you know what is working and what isn’t, you can capitalize on your strengths and improve your weaknesses.

The Ann Arbor Google Grants volunteers would like to thank the U-M School of Social Work for their partnership, and each of the panelists for sharing their knowledge and experience.

Save the Children is sending out local teams from Port-au-Prince to provide lifesaving assistance such as food, water and shelter for the victims of the earthquake. Read more or donate to help.

The Red Cross has released all of its emergency supplies from their Panama warehouse to provide relief for approximately 5,000 families. Read more or donate to help.

UNICEF will provide sanitation supplies, safe drinking water and basic health care in coordination with other UN agencies on the ground in Haiti. Read more or donate to help.

If you're a grant recipient providing relief to those affected by the earthquake in Haiti and have questions about managing your AdWords account to scale with traffic increases, please contact our team so we can make sure you reach those in need and those who can help.

As regular readers of this blog and Google enthusiasts know, Google offers a non-profit version of Google Apps, a suite of communication, collaboration, and publishing tools. One valuable component of Google Apps is Google Docs; Google Docs gives your group the ability to create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, all without managing attachments. This can help your organization be more efficient internally and externally, while also saving money.

You can check out real user examples on the Google Docs website. We love this story from a New Orleans volunteer organization that is putting Google Docs to work for their needs:

"We are using Google Docs to share info with other volunteers in our neighborhood association in New Orleans. We have "Block Captains" who each compile data on infrastructure issues related to Hurricane Katrina so that we can accelerate rebuilding our homes and our lives. One person uploads the data into Google Docs regarding the issues we find (like leaks and broken catch basins, missing street signs and stop signs). The spreadsheets are then shared with other members of the association, the Water board and the City so they can view the issues and address them."

This group concludes by saying, "Google Docs makes it easy for us to enter & is the ONLY way for us to share the up-to-date data." Read this story and other use cases from students, teachers, and more on the Google Docs site. When reviewing these stories, think about ways your organization could benefit from using Google Docs and the entire suite of Google Apps for Non-Profits to better meet your mission.

At the beginning of the year, most people take time to reflect on what they've accomplished in the past year and what their goals are for the next year. New Year's Resolutions are a chance to reinvent yourself and try out new experiences.

Take the time to reflect on your 2009. Not just the quantitative accomplishments, but the risks you took and the new strategies you tried. Did you change your focus? Did you launch a new marketing plan?

Google has some tools to help you plan for and test your new strategies in 2010.

Planning for 2010:

Insights for SearchInsights for Search is a great tool to plan for the seasonality of your organization. Use the "Compare by Time Ranges" functionality to see the seasonality for your top keywords. Here is an example of seasonality for the keyword phrase "donate to charity."

Ad PlannerGoogle Ad Planner allows you to gain a better understanding of demographic and traffic trends for your website. See if you have any new customer segments that you haven't pursued in the past, and plan for engaging with them in 2010.

YouTubeStart planning now for how you can take advantage of all the opportunities to engage with your target demographic via YouTube. If your organization has compelling commercials or video, post them on your own YouTube channel in order to reach the world's largest online video community. Check out our dedicated non-profit page: www.youtube.com/nonprofits.

As you likely know, Google Grants ads cannot be run on content partner sites in Google's ad network. However, the Google Grants Team is pleased to announce that we have a unique opportunity for a handful of grantees to participate in a month-long experiment to have ads for their organization shown on the Google Content Network for free. In this experiment, Googlers (Google employees) will create and manage a separate AdWords account for selected organizations to receive up to $500 worth of ad clicks on content sites in the Google Network at no cost to the organization. Note that the Googler will have full control over this separate account, creating ads and selecting keywords, and the participating grantee organization will not have access to the account or access to the Googler managing the account.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please review the requirements below.

Grantee Requirements:

Your organization must provide an active contact person who can be easily reached by email and phone if needed

If your organization meets these requirements and would like to be considered, please complete this form.

If you are selected for this limited experiment, we will reach out to you within the next 2 weeks. Thanks to all grantees who sign-up. We will be sure to spread the word about any other opportunities on the blog as they arise.